Problems while importing a txt file into postgres using php
Actually, you cannot run \copy via pg_query(). It is not an SQL command. It is a meta-command of the psql client.
There you can excute:
\copy data1 FROM 'data1.txt' WITH CSV HEADER DELIMITER AS ',' QUOTE AS '^'Or run the shell-command:
psql mydb -c "\copy data1 FROM 'data1.txt' WITH CSV HEADER DELIMITER AS ',' QUOTE AS '^'"Note the quotes. Values need to be single-quoted in PostgreSQL: 'value'.
Double-quotes are for identifiers - and are only actually needed for identifiers with upper case or illegal character or for reserved words: "My table".
I encountered the same problem, but instead of using the the raw psql \copy command, decided to use the Ecto.Adapters.SQL.stream/2 function to read the contents of the file, and Repo.transaction/1 that executes the normal SQL COPY command getting the data from STDIN provided by the stream as described in this blog. I haven't tested the performance of this but i figured it would be a good addition to this answer.